From the Toronto Star
Here’s the story as it appears in today’s Toronto Star business section. You can also read the full version here.
May 16, 2005. 07:22 AM
Powerbloggers turning to tags
ALEXANDRA SAMUEL
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
VANCOUVER—Joshua Schachter was working as a techie in the financial industry when he decided he needed a new way of organizing his growing collection of bookmarks — the list of websites he kept on his computer, in case he needed to revisit a site.
His solution was to create a database that stored his bookmarks online, so that he could access them from any computer that was connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world. To ensure that he could find the bookmarks he stored, he set up the database to accept tags — keywords that described each bookmark.
Type in a tag, and up pops Schacter’s personal list of every website that tag describes.
Schacter opened his database for public use in 2002 at the address http://del.icio.us. Three years later, his database is the darling of the digital elite.
Schacter recently quit his day job to focus full-time on del.icio.us, thanks to investment support from such heavy-hitters as Esther Dyson, Amazon.com, and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. The del.icio.us site itself has more than 80,000 users, and is one of the hottest topics and technologies among influential bloggers.
The del.icio.us tag system is the source of this heat — a heat that is spreading beyond del.icio.us to other corners of the Internet.
At del.icio.us, tags help users find their own bookmarks, and discover other resources they might not find on their own. Search for the tag “marketing” on the del.icio.us site and you find hundreds of marketing-related Web pages.
Unlike other Web page directories, the del.icio.us page for “marketing” doesn’t reflect the opinions of one editor — or worse, no editor at all — about which Web pages are worthwhile. Each del.icio.us tag brings up Web resources that have been selected by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Many del.icio.us users find these resource lists so useful that they set up notification systems that let them know when a new website has been added to a favourite topic.
Schachter’s vision of tagging as a method for collaboration has quickly spread across the Internet, as both websites and Web users embrace tags as a tool for working better together. Marnie Webb of CompuMentor, a non-profit, San Francisco-based provider of technology assistance for community-based organizations and schools, has convinced colleagues to use the “nptech” tag as a way of sharing information about the use of technology by non-profits.
Patrice Neff is a software developer based in Switzerland who uses del.icio.us to share links with a partner on a shared development project. And Cyprien Lomas, an academic technology expert at the faculty of agriculture at the University of British Columbia, uses del.icio.us tags to reconnect with colleagues in the tech field.
These early experiments reveal the pent-up demand for simple tools to support online collaboration. But they also reveal how tagging unlocks the gateway between information and community. By allowing people to share information effectively, tags create and support a growing number of online communities. And by bringing communities together around common interests, tags add value to the information those communities gather.
Del.icio.us isn’t the only site to link information, business and community through tagging. Inspired by del.icio.us, Canadian photo sharing site Flickr adopted tags to organize user-contributed photos. When a Flickr member uploads a photo to the site, she has the option of tagging it with a few words that describe the photo’s subject or image. Visit the “britishcolumbia” tag page for almost 5,500 photos of B.C. Or flip through almost 7,000 images tagged “office,” or 17,000 tagged “phone.”
Blogs are getting tag-friendly too, thanks to Technorati, a website that lets people search blog content. Many bloggers file their stories under category names, so that a story about the Gomery inquiry is stored under the category “Canadian politics” or “Gomery.” Technorati uses those category names as tags, so that every blog post that has been tagged as “Gomery” can be found in one place on the Technorati Web site.
That’s good news for blog readers who need a better way to find relevant information in the ever-growing world of blogs. And it’s great news for the bloggers themselves, who are embracing tags as a way of building online communities around shared interests and information.
“We’re still excited by the number of people who are using it to do group-forming,” says Technorati CEO David Sifry. “I know people who were saying let’s do a dynamic travelogue about Ireland. Somebody said if you travel to Ireland, tag your pictures and posts “Ireland” and we’ll all get together.”
Tag-based communities aren’t limited to projects like European road trips. Tags are helping people solve problems and work smarter. When 350 bloggers gathered recently for Canada’s first blogging conference, Northern Voice, organizers wanted to mirror the live meeting with a lively online presence. With a limited budget, they couldn’t afford a team of videographers or stenographers.
So they asked participants to use the tag “northernvoice” in stories they wrote during the conference and in photos they posted online. The Northern Voice website automatically scoured the Web for those tags, and pulled the stories and images on to its own pages. By the end of the one-day conference, participants had collectively created a website with more than 600 stories and an equal number of photos. “The online and post conference made the whole event much more rich than just the eight hours we spent in the room together,” says Kris Krug, a creator in the Northern Voice blog.
Tagging worked particularly well for Northern Voice because its participants were already part of the blogging world. But it’s clear that tagging is already spreading beyond the ranks of computer geeks.
First posted on May 16,2005
